Rockford aerospace worker ‘bit by Apollo’ wins NASA award

ROCKFORD — A 29-year veteran with UTC Aerospace Systems received a rare award from NASA that has only been given to a local professional twice since it was established in 1963.

Space Systems engineering manager Steve Tollefson received the Space Flight Awareness Leadership Award during a surprise presentation Tuesday. NASA has given the honor to about 450 people in 51 years.

Tollefson follows in the footsteps of Rudy Valdez, who was honored in 2003.

“As a kid I got bit by Apollo and always wanted to work in the space program and stuck to it,” the 55-year-old told more than 60 people who crowded into a conference room to see him receive the award. Apollo was NASA’s third manned spaceflight program and resulted in the first trips to the moon.

Tollefson deflected credit, saying he couldn’t win an award of this magnitude if not for the contributions of all.

Space Flight Awareness was established after the Mercury and Gemini programs to give the space program a stronger consciousness of quality and safety. UTC Aerospace, known for decades as Sundstrand Corp., has been a NASA supplier from the earliest days of the space program. Sundstrand was a contractor on the X-20A Dyna-Soar in 1961, a single-pilot reusable spaceplane.

Ken Smith, the Kennedy Space Center operations manager for Boeing Exploration Systems, presented the award to Tollefson. Smith especially highlighted his work on the Return-to-Flight program after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, killing the seven-astronaut crew.

It wasn’t publicized in 2003, but the explosion shook UTC Aerospace deeply because initially it was thought that a UTC-built power unit may have failed; a shattered tile in the wing caused the explosion.

“We had all the orbiters built. It was a mature program,” Smith said. “All of a sudden, we lost an orbiter. We started to go into a lot of forensics. That’s where Steve was crucial. We started dissecting every bit of data. We didn’t know why we’d lost Columbia. We dug into every bit of historical data. What may have caused it? Was there something we’d missed?”

Smith said Tollefson led the effort to re-establish best practices for manufacturing, resurrect dormant test equipment and provide technical support for processes that were decades old.

It was part of a massive effort to discover the problem, fix it and get shuttles back in space. Discovery launched in July 2005, about 30 months after the Columbia disaster.

The space shuttle program came to a close in 2011, and UTC Aerospace Systems is working with NASA on Space Launch System, a shuttle-derived heavy launch vehicle that is scheduled to have its first test flight in 2017.

“Like any new system, there are a lot of technological issues you have to work through,” Tollefson said. “The team is working well and things are coming together, and the big payoff will come in December 2017.”